Dark Traffic, Zero-Click Attribution, and How to Fix Your Marketing Reporting

Marketing attribution is getting worse.

Maybe you’ve noticed this. There was a time when companies could reasonably expect to see where most of their traffic and sales were coming from, allowing them to refine their campaigns to focus on those areas. But in recent years, attribution seems to have grown less and less accurate. So, what gives?

The problem can be traced back to two related issues: Dark traffic and zero-click attribution. If you’re not familiar with those terms, don’t worry — we’ll explore what both of those things are later on the page. In total, we’ll cover the following topics:

• What is dark traffic?
• What is zero-click attribution?
• Why are these issues happening?
• What to do about dark traffic
• What to do about zero-click attribution

Read on to find out more. And to get more digital marketing info sent straight to your inbox, be sure to subscribe to Revenue Weekly, our email newsletter!

What is dark traffic?

Dark traffic is a type of direct traffic that doesn’t have a clear origin.

If you don’t know what direct traffic is, it’s traffic that (in theory) comes from users directly typing a URL into the search bar and heading straight to your site, rather than clicking on a link somewhere. But in reality, a lot of the traffic that reporting tools like Google Analytics ascribe to direct traffic actually comes from somewhere else.

Those reporting tools may not know where your site traffic is coming from. In those cases, they’ll often just categorize it as direct traffic by default. But that heavily skews your attribution, which is a big problem.

What is zero-click attribution?

Zero-click attribution is the process of attempting to attribute marketing results to searches where users don’t click on anything. These are called zero-click searches, and they’ve grown more and more common over the years.

Your web content can still influence users if they see it in zero-click searches, and it may still drive results for you down the line. But you have no way of knowing that, because without clicks, there’s no trackable connection between those searches and the results they lead to. Naturally, that throws off your reporting.

Why are these issues happening?

There are several different reasons for the uptick in dark traffic and zero-click searches. Firstly, it’s important to realize that attribution depends on data tracking. But data tracking has grown more and more restricted due to things like:

• Data privacy laws
• Widespread use of adblockers
• Increased shift from web browsers to apps

Those and other factors have made it increasingly difficult for businesses to track user activity, which hurts their attribution.

There’s also the impact of zero-click searches. So, what causes those searches? Ultimately, it’s the fact that search engines and other platforms don’t really want people to click on links. They want them to stay there, on their platform. So, you get things like search engine results page (SERP) features from Google.

These features aim to answer user queries right there in the search results, negating the need for users to click on any of the ranking pages. Of course, most of these SERP features still draw from external website content, and even credit the sites they pull from.

So, it’s not that you can’t still impact user behavior through zero-click searches. It’s just that if you do, you’ll have no way of tracking it.

What to do about dark traffic

We’ve explored the trouble with dark traffic, as well as what causes it. Now let’s talk about a few of the things you can do to navigate this issue, including:

• Use UTM codes
• Block your company’s IP addresses
• Segment your direct traffic reporting

Keep reading for more info.

Use UTM codes

One way to decrease your dark traffic is to make it easier for your reporting tools to identify traffic from some of your different marketing materials like emails, social media posts, and so on. To do that, you can add UTM codes to all the website links you include in those materials.

UTM codes insert additional parameters to the traffic coming from these channels, giving them a higher chance of being accurately recognized and attributed in your reporting.

Block your company’s IP addresses

Another issue that may be affecting your dark traffic attribution is that your own marketing and web design teams visit a lot of the pages on your site as part of their day-to-day jobs. You don’t want to track this traffic, since it’s not actually contributing to any leads or revenue.

To address this issue, you can simply block your company’s IP address (or addresses, if you have more than one) in your reporting tools. That way, site visits from within your company won’t be tracked at all.

Segment your direct traffic reporting

Adding UTM codes and blocking internal IP addresses should help decrease your dark traffic, but you’ll still probably be left with some. At this point, the most important thing you can do is make sure you know how much of your direct traffic is genuine, versus how much is actually dark traffic.

To do that, ask yourself this question: Which pages would you expect to earn direct traffic? Direct traffic relies on someone manually typing in a URL from memory. So, while it might be common for your homepage to earn a lot of direct traffic, you wouldn’t expect pages with longer, more specific URLs to do the same.

What you want to do is go into your reporting tool and segment your direct traffic into two categories. Have one category focus on your homepage and any other pages you think would be likely to earn direct traffic. The other category should have everything else.

Going forward, you can safely assume that most of the traffic in the first category really is direct traffic. The second category, though, is probably made up mostly of dark traffic. Distinguishing between the two will help make your reporting and attribution more accurate.

What to do about zero-click attribution

We’ve explored how to address dark traffic, but what about zero-click attribution? How do you fix that?

The short answer is, you don’t. Attribution works by following clicks. That means it’s powerless when it comes to searches where there are no clicks. If you expected some magical method for telepathically determining which zero-click searches lead to a given sale, sorry — there isn’t one.

Instead, the best solution to zero-click attribution is to simply worry less about being able to attribute every single sale to every single campaign that influenced it. After all, that’s how it used to be done before digital tracking became a thing. And now that precise tracking is on the decline, it’s time to reassess the value of doing it the old-fashioned way.

That doesn’t mean you have to ditch tracking altogether. We just got done covering some creative dark traffic attribution solutions, after all. By all means, use tracking where it’s available and effective. But in cases where it’s not — like zero-click searches — you’ll need to be content with a much vaguer attribution system.

If you try out a new tactic and suddenly your sales see a huge boost, there’s a good chance it’s because of that new tactic — even if you can’t precisely track each of those specific sales back to it. That’s still a reliable way of running certain campaigns.

Plus, when it comes to zero-click searches, there are still ways to optimize for them to help increase your sales and revenue.

For instance, you can directly address questions in your content with designated headers, beneath which you can answer those questions in a few sentences. That will help your content show up in things like featured snippets and direct answer boxes.

Even if users don’t click on your site, they’ll still remember that your business helped them answer their questions, which may bring them back later.

Improve your marketing attribution with MarketingCloudFX

Just because you may encounter issues with zero-click searches and dark traffic attribution doesn’t mean you can’t still improve your marketing attribution elsewhere. But in order to do that, you’ll need the right tools, starting with MarketingCloudFX (MCFX).

MCFX is much more than just an attribution tool. It’s our own proprietary marketing software, and it can help you manage everything from lead tracking to content creation. We also offer several other tools to our clients that can help you drive more revenue.

To learn how our technology can help you close your reporting gap, give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!